


New Tricks

by AquilaMage



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen, Merle tries but his conflicted feelings get in the way, Not the best dad, Parent-Child Relationship, but not as bad as he thinks really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-18
Updated: 2016-11-18
Packaged: 2018-08-31 16:06:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8585011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AquilaMage/pseuds/AquilaMage
Summary: Merle wants to be a better father, but it’s not as simple as all that.





	

Merle hadn’t been expecting any incoming calls on his stone of farspeech, with everyone being on the base at the moment, so it comes as a surprise when it starts lighting up one day a few weeks after their latest mission.  


“Dad?” Mavis’ voice comes through the stone.  


“Yeah, it’s me.” He frowns. “What happened, do I-“  


“Nothing, dad. It’s just that when you gave me my stone I didn’t have your frequency but I thought that since you had this one’s you would call me or something to make sure I could contact you. So then when you didn’t I had to go prying through mom’s stuff to see if I could find it, and I figured that I should make sure what I had was actually the right one.” Her tone as she explains isn’t disapproving, it’s just calm.  


“Well, you got that one right,” he says. There’s a moment of silence before she speaks again.  


“Okay, then.” Her voice is slow, as if she’s hoping he’ll interrupt before she can finish. “I’ll go then. Thanks for picking up.” And the line goes silent.  


\---

The next call comes during a break in one of the many long training session the Director has been keeping them all on. From its spot on the pile of his stuff in one of the locker areas, he sees his stone light up.  


“Hey dad, it’s Mavis.”  


Placing a hand over it, he glances around to make sure no-one else is nearby. “Oh hey kiddo. What’s going on? You’ve been calling pretty often.”  


“…Actually, it’s been a month since last time.”  


“Oh.” Shit. Had it really? He’d kept meaning to call her. Just to check in, ask how she’d been. Y’know, the barest attempt to be fatherly. “Well daddy’s been pretty busy lately, what with-“  


“Yeah, work. I know.”  


He can tell she’s trying not to sound frustrated. And she’s doing a decent job. _Hiding her problems. Great. Not exactly what you wanted to teach her, eh Merle?_ The sigh is already partway out of his system before he realizes that she would hear only that. “-with work keeping me so busy. I don’t like it either, but what can you do?”  


“I guess so.”  


The hesitance in her voice sets off an uncomfortable feeling in his stomach, and what parental instincts that he does have are telling him to do something about it. “So, what did you need?” he asks.  


There’s a pause, as if she hadn’t prepared for getting this far. “Well, Mookie’s been asking about you a lot, and you know how he gets.”  


He doesn’t doubt it – the boy was very insistent once he started on something he wanted – but there’s a sense that maybe that’s just an excuse. The slightest thought that maybe she might be missing him too. But then again, it’s never happened before. He gives a laugh, one of those that’s there more to show the other person you’re still listening than anything else. “Yes, I do. And you can tell him that I’ll come down the next time that I have a break. Maybe even next week. Sound good?”  


Before another week goes by, they’re sent off on a planetside training mission, and any plans he would have made are quickly forgotten in the midst of all the exploring and fighting they’re doing.  


But it’s all he can think of as he scrabbles around in the dirt next to him to find his stone. Things had been going fine until a careless spell had caused an avalanche that had tripped Merle and sent him down the cliff away from the others. Once everything stops shaking and he’s sure that he won’t be falling any more, he takes stock of his surroundings. Surrounded by rocks and only more trees in sight, but otherwise no immediate danger. He sits up but falls back almost immediately. There’s a sharp pain in his side and oh would you look at that, he’s bleeding pretty badly. But he doesn’t panic. He’s seen worse, and he’s pretty sure he can handle this, until his head swims the moment he tries to cast a spell. _Oh hell._

So he’s searching around for the stone, trying to hold down the fear because even if he does find it, because he’s the cleric, for Pan’s sake, so it’s hardly going to do much good besides having someone around to watch him when he passes out from attempting to do magic.  


When several minutes’ search still comes up with nothing, he’s no longer able to stop himself from thinking the worst. The injury itself isn’t bad, but he’s completely alone and unable to defend himself and it is definitely getting dark out in a forest they know to be dangerous. Thoughts of what might happen scroll across the backdrop of his mind until he realizes that there isn’t anyone on base who would even know to talk to his family. Well, there was the boy detective, and that thought alone spurred him on in his search, because all he could picture was the kid telling him he wasn’t such a bad parent, and that hadn’t been an accurate description of what he’d been like lately.  


There’s a clink as his wood arm hits something more glassy as the rocks around. Now that he has the stone of farspeech back, he knows he should get to the others, but the memories of his last conversation with Mavis mean he’s calling her instead. He waits, and waits, and when it finally goes for him to leave a message he mutters into it quickly 

“Hey, what’s up? Where are you? I need to talk, okay?”  


He hangs up and goes to call again, but freezes. What does he even say beyond that? Merle knows the feelings, but he’s never actually expressed any of the words that people use for them. Some kind of apology, probably. What he wants is to say that he cares, that he wishes she had someone better as a parent because she deserves more than a dad who forgets to even call her once in a while and that he’s sorry it took him this long to really try rather than just mean to. But it all gets caught in his throat and after a minute he lets the arm holding the stone fall to the side as the emotions overwhelm him. A heavy breath and he calls for Magnus and Taako instead, able to disguise the shakiness in his voice as a result of the injury. By the time they get to him and use a potion they happen to have, he’s been able to suppress those feelings and go on with their objective.

\---

It isn’t until after they’re done and back on the moonbase, when he gets back to his own room and lies down on his bed, that his stone lights up. 

Mavis starts talking as soon as he picks up, sounding concerned. “Dad? I got your call. Are you alright? What’s going on?” 

Oh right. A message had been sent, after all. Merle tightens his grip on the stone, and for a second, he considers finishing what he had tried to say before. But however he tries to phrase it, nothing comes out. 

If he couldn’t say it then, when it didn’t matter because he wouldn’t be around to have to deal with the consequences, then how was he supposed to be able to do it now? And without that pressure, without the ability to shrug it off as “well I thought I was going to die, of course I’d say something crazy like that,” he couldn’t do it. Because as good as it might feel to say something…genuinely parental… to her, it would just end in disappointment. She would get her hopes up and start expecting that from him in the future, and he knew that as much as he might actually just maybe want that, it wouldn’t happen. He had never been that kind of father, so why would this change things? The moment when he decided not to say anything when it would have mattered the most had decided it, and there was no going back. 

“No, it wasn’t anything.” He finds himself feeling distant as he finally speaks, as if he was watching himself rather than being in control of his mouth. “In fact, I hadn’t actually meant to call you; I was trying to get ahold of one of my good-for-nothing coworkers.” The laugh he gives feels forced, but hopefully not enough that she’d notice. 

“Oh.” Her voice comes through a moment later, and something breaks in him. Even with only that single sound, there’s an implied sigh of disappointment. “Okay. I’ll let you go then. Bye dad.” And she hangs up. 

Merle sits there, stone of farspeech held up to his face until a sound from the other room brings him out of his frozen state. He places it on the table next to him and buries his face in his hands. 

All he’d wanted to do was not upset her, and he’d sunk even lower than he’d been before. At least then Mavis hadn’t expected anything of him, and his behavior was alright. But simply the act of calling her, even when it hadn’t been anything of substance, had been enough to make her think things could be different. That was what he wanted too, and he had even gotten a second chance to say as much, and he had blown that too, all because he had to take the easy way out. Because it was simpler to avoid his own discomfort than think about his own daughter’s feelings for even a second; it would always be far easier to fall back on years of bad habits than change.

**Author's Note:**

> I feel bad for writing this because I don’t think it would actually happen (or at least my heart doesn’t want it to be a possibility), but the idea sprung into my head with absolutely no prompting and wouldn’t leave me alone. It was very persuasive, especially since I’ve been wanting to write something for taz for a while but couldn’t think of anything until now.  
> Also this was written completely out of order so who knows what that did to the comprehensibility oops.


End file.
